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PG) The Demiurge or divine craftsman is the creator God in Platonic Gnosticism Platonism, Neoplatonism, Pythagoreanism responsible for fashioning and maintaining the physical universe. the Demiurge is the agent who takes the preexisting materials of chaos, arranges them according to the models of eternal forms, and produces all the physical things of the world, including human bodies. The Demiurge is sometimes thought of as the Platonic personification of active reason or Nous (the divine intellect) the timaeus describes the Demiurge as unreservedly benevolent, and hence desirous of a world as good as possible. The world remains imperfect, however, because the Demiurge created the world out of a chaotic, indeterminate non-being. Plotinus and the later Platonists worked to clarify the Demiurge In order to reconcile Aristotelian with Platonian philosophy, Plotinus metaphorically identified the demiurge (or nous) within the pantheon of the Gods as Zeus in the cosmology of Platonic Gnosticism the Demiurge is Sophia. MZ) The question for me is how to relate the Demiurge and Sophia to Ahura Mazda (especially when Mazda and Sophia apparently mean the same thing - i.e. Wisdom). I want Ahura Mazda to be the perfectly good God - the Wise Lord who always directs things in the best way possible. However for me Sophia is just creative wisdom - and this can be misdirected. What Sophia creates can end up being a tool of evil. Maybe Ahura Mazda is 'all-seeing' whereas Sophia has 'limited seeing' . Sophia can find solutions to problems in her field of view, but doesn't always see the wider consequences. |